Published by Rob Chambers on 26/06/2018

Quite Simply...

You'd be foolish not to...

In the 1920s, there was a massive shift from using horse drawn carriages to cars. It took a long time and people didn't want to give up their cheap buggies in lieu of a technology they didnt get, the motorcar.
Even later on, the shift from newspapers to wireless, to radio and even then to TV, people still struggled to shift with the times. And today, one of the biggest shifts in information technology is into what is being dubbed the information age. The industrial revolution is remembered as a golden age where new technology brought opportunity and an exciting new future.

This should be the same for the Information age and specifically the cloud.

Microsoft realised this many years ago and through years of development and the end result of that work, is office 365.

Whilst this blog post outlines the primary reasons to move, you can also find more information about Office 365 on our Office 365 page here

Accessibility

Office 365 is universally accessible via the internet. As long as you have a browser, you can access your stuff.

Availability

Office 365 has the highest guaranteed uptime of any Software as a Service provider. 99.9995% SLA, means that as long as you are online, so is Office 365.

Productivity

Using a number of interesting technologies, Office 365 literally re-writes the book on collaboration and workflow.

Communication

Office 365 uses Skype for Business and teams to improve communication. You can now call your colleagues right from within Word or Excel.

Security

Microsoft have taken your security very seriously. They have secure datacentres and offer multifactor authentication. They also give us security reports, like you have never seen before.

Simplicity

Office 365 also set out to simplify the licensing model. It is now much simpler to stay compliant.

120 m

Active Business Users

300

Updates per year

99.9995%

Guaranteed uptime

What does all this mean?

In simple terms...

Office 365 provides almost all of your business IT workloads, without the need for a server sitting in the corner.

It is not however; necessarily designed to save you money directly. Office 365 converts most of your capital expenditure into operational expenditure. In realistic terms, over 5 years it will save you some cash, but its not really the savings that count, you will still have the cost, but it is distributed on a monthly / annual basis, so when your servers come to renewal, you will find that you need less to spend on servers as a one off cost, and then you pay a subscription for the Cloud to cover the main workloads.

For example if you had 100 users using Exchange, Active Directory and File Shares, over 5 years:

On-Premise Server Costs (Estimated)

Server costs: £13,000
Exchange & CALS: £6,800
Electricity (5 years): £1,500
Estimated migration costs: £6,000
Office 2016 / 2019 Business: £40,000 (2x upgrades)

Total: £67,300

First Year: £47,300
Third Year: £20,000

Office 365 Costs (Business Premium)

Server Costs: £4,000
Licenses: £56,000 (£9.4 x 100 x 60 months)
Electricity (5 years) £500
Migration Costs: £4,000
Office Software: Included in license

Total: £64,500

First Year: £19,380
Annual: £11,380

As you can see the overall savings for the first 5 years aren't much to write home about, but you pay for it gradually instead of all at once. Also when you consider:

  1. Office 365 also contains SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business, Planner, Yammer and much more
  2. You will not need to migrate again
  3. Server updates, maintenance, backups and all the trimmings that come with a server will reduce significantly.

The Office 365 Model starts to look much more attractive. If you haven't started your Office 365 journey we would recommend looking at a trial edition that you can test out. QiC can help you with this, just use the form below, or alternatively you can sign up for a free 30 day trial here: